Fixing To Die

The scenery during the drive distracted him from the concerns he had about their reason for going to Natchez. At first he had been excited about ghost-hunting with Miss An’gel and Miss Dickce, but during the early hours of the morning he awoke from a disturbing dream and had trouble going back to sleep. In the dream he found himself in his old home in California, pursued by ghosts with terrifying faces. They wanted something from him, but he was never able to discover what. As ghostly hands reached for him and brushed against his face, he awoke to find Peanut licking him and Endora sitting on his chest. Reassured by the presence of his four-legged friends, he had eventually thrown off the immediate effects of the dream and gone back to sleep.

In the early morning light, however, as he prepared for the drive to Natchez, he found it difficult to push away the memories of those horrible faces. The malevolence in them had terrified him in the dream, and he wondered what he and the sisters might find lurking in the atmosphere of Cliffwood. He found himself fretting over that same question now that they had arrived. Their stories of the weird things that happened at Riverhill hadn’t made him feel any better, though they assured him nothing really terrible ever happened. He was glad he didn’t sleep in the house, though. The ghosts at Riverhill—if that’s what they were—had so far not touched anything in his apartment.

“Thank you, Benjy,” Miss An’gel said from the seat beside him as she unbuckled her seat belt. “You really are an excellent driver. I thoroughly enjoyed the trip down. Didn’t you, Sister?” She turned to glance at Dickce in the backseat. “Especially since I could actually see individual trees, rather than a blur as we zoomed by.”

Benjy watched Miss Dickce’s expression in the rearview mirror. For a moment he thought she was going to stick her tongue out at her elder sister, and he had to suppress a laugh. He had seen her do it before.

Instead, Miss Dickce shrugged. “Yes, it would have been a shame to miss the scenery. The Trace is always beautiful.”

Peanut woofed in Benjy’s ear. Benjy knew the Labradoodle was eager to get out of the car and explore—and to do his business, as the sisters always referred to it. He slid out of the driver’s seat and prepared to open the rear door. First, however, he held up his hand, palm toward the window, to let Peanut know he had to stay. The dog whined but remained on the seat when Benjy opened the door. He quickly attached a leash and grabbed a plastic bag.

“I’d better let him explore a little before we go inside,” Benjy told the sisters. “Otherwise he might have an accident.”

“Excellent idea,” Miss Dickce said. “I’ll bring Endora while An’gel rings the doorbell to let them know we’re here.”

While he and Miss Dickce let the animals wander around the neatly clipped expanse of front lawn, Benjy gazed at the house. He had found several pictures of it in a book on antebellum houses Miss An’gel had.

Cliffwood stood on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, and when Benjy shifted his stance and gazed to the west for a moment, he could see where the land dropped away, with a hint of water. From the second-story gallery of the house, he knew he would have an excellent view of the river. He turned back to look at the house and recalled what he had read about it.

The original structure was built in the 1780s, but a lightning strike during a fierce storm in 1852 resulted in its complete destruction. The family rebuilt on a grander scale, this time in the Greek revival style popular at the time. Cliffwood had two stories, each surrounded by a gallery on all four sides. Columns lined three sides of the house, and inside there were fifteen rooms. Benjy remembered reading that there were several outbuildings as well, among them a building that would have housed slaves, a kitchen, and a laundry. That had been converted, along with a former dairy and an old carriage house, into suites for the bed-and-breakfast started by Mary Turner’s parents in the late 1970s.

Miss An’gel’s book hadn’t offered any information about ghosts or other supernatural manifestations at Cliffwood, although it did mention such things about other houses, such as Stanton Hall and its spectral Confederate soldiers.

Benjy thought Riverhill, the ancestral home of the Ducote family, was one of the most beautiful and imposing homes he had ever seen. But with its white columns, white walls, and dark shutters, not to mention its grand size, Cliffwood outshone Riverhill. The midday autumn sun seemed to envelop the house in a golden haze, and for a moment Benjy’s eyes dazzled from the effect.

“Spectacular, isn’t it?” Miss Dickce said. “Look, you’d better pick that up before you tread in it.” She pointed at the ground near Benjy’s feet.